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As a footnote to the discussion, I think Sandor advised not to practice "the whole piece slowly," but rather just the technically challenging passages. For example, it would be pointless to practice the first section of Chopin's F major Ballade slowly. So, the idea of playing a piece from start to finish at a slow tempo needs that little caveat. Who has time to waste when there is so much magnificent music to study?

While many on this thread advocate slow practice, I don't see much consistency in their different reasons for advocating it. (Of course, it's possible that slow practice has more than one benefit.)I also find several of the given explanations of the benefits of slow practice to be unclear in the extreme.

Here is a clear one, and it's the only one I actually need: it works. I do the slow practice, and it results in an improved ability to play the music. Simple as that.

I don't find any particular need to explain why it works to myself. Explanations of that sort, especially when something is working, are something I tend to distrust, and I do have an explanation for that distrust. It is because I find that conceptualizations of a process can get in the way and drag me down by shifting my focus to "thinking about" rather than "doing". And it is because sometimes, and in some circumstances, having a concept about what one is doing can cause a certain rigidity point of view that I find not to be helpful, many times. Since I don't need any of that to get slow practice to work, I avoid them.

OTOH, speculations about why it may work, here in this thread, don't necessarily get internalized, so they aren't really a problem. It's only a problem if I decide "this is what is happening", rather than "hmm, that might be a reason it works".

Thank you! I write a good part of the day as part of my job. I don't feel like explaining every detail and thought about my enjoyment with the piano. I don't mind sharing a few quick observations about my experience. I just don't feel like doing much more than that. I just want to play it and try things out to get it the way I want it!

At today's lesson, I brought up my difficulty bringing up the tempo in that broad flourish section of the Liszt Sonetto 104. (I can actually play it quite well, it just doesn't sound like a flourish, yet. I think it needs more speed.) I had already tried slow practice and could play it perfectly. I had also tried playing it in different rhythms. He suggested playing the notes in groups of three - very fast - like a snap - and then taking a good sized pause in between each group. When I did it, my problem area became immediately apparent because it involved a quick reach, something that would not show up in slow practice. He also suggested being fully expressive during slow practice, something I hadn't been doing. He said the problem could be due to how the hand is weighted and the direction of the phrase - which will only show up if I'm playing with expression. So, it's back to slow practice with expression and snapping through the notes in little groups. I also have to become fully confident playing those notes - without looking.

Until I was 21, I lived and breathed slow practice, as I had heard from teacher after teacher that it was the only way to build speed and gain technical confidence. Come 21, my first year of grad school, I began studying with a woman who was regarded as a "technique expert", and, admittedly had one of the most phenomenal techniques I have seen (She has recorded some of the cleanest, fastest Chopin Etudes ever set to record).

At our very first studio class meeting, she (aggressively) addressed all of us:

"I HATE slow practice. Slow practice is one of the biggest lies and fallacies of modern piano pedagogy. If we have a problem with a passage, we need to go back to words and sentences to fix it, NOT letters! We only slow ourselves down by practicing slowly!!"

Her suggestion, rather, was to begin practicing music up to tempo from the outset, but in VERY SMALL GROUPS. (exactly as Goddog's teacher said). Let's say you were playing a Chopin etude - you would practice the first group of 4 notes up to tempo, then silently land on the first note of the next group. Once you had the group of 4 down, you would increased the group to 8, then 12 and so on. This was, naturally, a huge change in the way I thought about practicing and my philosophy of technical work. Being her student I began to practice that way.

It didn't really work. For me at least. It didn't to any conceivable harm, but certainly didn't work the magic that it had seemed to potentiate. I learned that, incidentally, Brendel and Mischa Dichter also practice this way - they start up to tempo, but in small groups, and very rarely practice slowly. By contrast, Rachmaninoff and Shura Cherkassky famously practiced excruciatingly slowly (at about a similar tempo to the video that I posted earlier in this thread).

As for the present, I've reached the conclusion that it's important to practice at ALL TEMPOS, since every different tempo presents a different problem. The majority of my practicing, however, is at a SLIGHTLY slow tempo, but with all the phrasing, dynamics, and gestures in tact. This way, you are still getting the benefits of slow practice, but within the context of the actual gesture of the passage.

Moral of the story: It's too personal a thing to make any rule about. If you hate slow practicing and can do without it as my old teacher and others do, then so be it. If you want to feel everything at 5 mph, then so be that. It depends on each individual's brain and nervous system, and everybody physiologically executes information from the mind different ways. They key is to listen to YOURSELF, experiment in your own practicing, and reach a decision on your own observation and experiences.

I also find several of the given explanations of the benefits of slow practice to be unclear in the extreme.

Agreed. One of the most difficult things about practice methods is being able to explain WHY something works. I still don't know for sure why slow practice works, but here is the most probable theory I can come up with:

I believe that you taught math at one point. When explaining how to solve a math problem, what do you do? You break it down into steps for students. 1. 2. 3. 4. etc. Even if you can do it much faster or almost instantly in your head, the students still need to learn things step by step - aka - SLOWLY. If they do twenty of the same type of problems, chances are they can nail the 20th much faster than the 1st, because they have since become much more aquatinted with the steps.

Slow practice is the same type of thing. When we practice a passage, what we are essentially doing is TEACHING our body to remember certain small movements. Technique itself is memory - not the memory of notes, but the memory of physical movements and sensations of our body at the piano. In order to ingrain these movements effectively, we need to feed this information to the brain, and the best way to do this is SLOWLY. By doing repetitions slowly, we are injecting information into our brain at a pace comfortable enough for it to say "Ah hah!!, THAT'S it". If these movements are too fast, the brain will not have time to comfortably detect and store them. Once each individual movement is refined, and secured away in that gray, miraculous mass, then we can begin to play faster and "skip steps" so to speak.

Of course, there is the argument that we are not actually using the same movements, muscles, and gestures when we play fast as when we practice slowly, and thus the whole thing is just a huge ironical waste of time. But that's a topic for another day

I do believe sometimes the board itself has something to do with it. I'm not a good piano player, but i try (I learn without a teacher, so it goes slow ;-) ).

In example, a piece from Final Fantasy called 'Eternal Harvest'. The trick is to get it very fast but very tight on both hands. Absolutely need to have perfect sync between two hands. For many, it's actually not a that hard piece).

what I found out, is that most digital piano's weren't properly able to get you that feeling to sync. The response of the keys and the sound doesn't seem to match well. My V-piano is reasonable up to the standard, but a real piano will definitely be much easier to practice. Purely because of its directness.

I also think that's why practicing it slow does matter ;-)

Dunno what everyone else experience, but I have the urge to go fast. No apparent reason.

Her suggestion, rather, was to begin practicing music up to tempo from the outset, but in VERY SMALL GROUPS. (exactly as Goddog's teacher said). Let's say you were playing a Chopin etude - you would practice the first group of 4 notes up to tempo, then silently land on the first note of the next group. Once you had the group of 4 down, you would increased the group to 8, then 12 and so on.

IIRC, Philip Fowke advocates a method something like this (and, judging from an CD of knuckle-busters he recorded, he has got technique to burn). But, the way I remember hearing about his version of it, it was divided beat to beat, and there was no requirement that you land silently on the first note of the next beat - you went ahead and played it. And also, the way I understood it, you did one beat at a time through the whole piece, before you started stitching them together. Obviously, if you simply add more and more to the beginning, you will end up with a gradation of practice over the piece where the beginning has been practiced an enormous amount compared to the ending. I can't imagine how that would be a good thing.

I've tried this out in a very limited way, and it seemed to work kind of sort of work, but not so much that I wanted to continue. But the piece I was using as a test may have been inappropriately difficult for trying out a very new technique. Maybe I'll try it again on something less challenging and see how that goes.

_________________________
Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life. -Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski

At today's lesson, I brought up my difficulty bringing up the tempo in that broad flourish section of the Liszt Sonetto 104. (I can actually play it quite well, it just doesn't sound like a flourish, yet. I think it needs more speed.) I had already tried slow practice and could play it perfectly. I had also tried playing it in different rhythms. He suggested playing the notes in groups of three - very fast - like a snap - and then taking a good sized pause in between each group. When I did it, my problem area became immediately apparent because it involved a quick reach, something that would not show up in slow practice. He also suggested being fully expressive during slow practice, something I hadn't been doing. He said the problem could be due to how the hand is weighted and the direction of the phrase - which will only show up if I'm playing with expression. So, it's back to slow practice with expression and snapping through the notes in little groups. I also have to become fully confident playing those notes - without looking.

I would gladly nominate this as practice post of the year! These are the really essential things.

Everything has its place: slow, fast, loud, soft and anything in between. There are times when slow practice just doesn't work, and it would be better to learn each hand individually (maybe in phrase groups) and play it at tempo before putting it together with the other hand, e.g. when playing 11 notes in RH against 15 notes in LH. Once you've learnt the notes, you need to speed up to the tempo you'll be playing it at. If you start to flounder, slow down to the pace you were comfortable at at start from there.

Don't forget, training is specific as all athletes will tell you. If you want to run a fast marathon, you need to train to run fast.....

_________________________
"I don't play accurately - anyone can play accurately - but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte. I keep science for Life."

Schnabel maintained and advised: "One should never make any music, not even sound one musical note, without a musical intention preceding it."

I don't know of any better prescription for cultivating facility. Being able to clearly deliberate the musical intention of a playing-movement prior to executing it seems to me crucial for controlling it exactly as required, and equally crucial for forming a reliable, vivid memory of the music's detailed content. For me the basic purpose of slow practising is to utilize the expanded time-span to ensure that every playing-movement is in fact effortlessly achieving its intended musical outcome, and if it isn't, for ascertaining whether my musical intention preceding it is sufficiently clear in my mind - 9 times out of 10 I discover it's not, or even non-existent. In that event, the purpose of slow-practising shifts to improving the clarity of my intentions and the rapidity and reliability with which I can bring them to mind. That said, the purpose of slow-practising is to acquire the ability to think fast. But in work of this nature, the mind won't be bullied into doing so. It's essential to work at a pace that permits recognizing that each intention is clearly defined, and initially that pace may need to be (especially in the case of very demanding passages and atonal compositions in general) a quarter or even smaller fraction of the music's required tempo - whatever it takes. Perseverance over a number of sessions is often necessary to achieve rapid, clearly defined recall of musical intentions, but it does come!

I think that slow practice has its benefits. Just as you sometimes need to spend money in order to earn money, you often need to practice slowly in order to learn how to play rapidly. When you attempt to play too fast too soon, the muscles have a tendency to sieze up and become tight- which obviously is counterproductive, as you need looseness and flexibility to achieve speed. I think that the problem is that sometimes your body is not comfortable approaching a new passage at breakneck speed. Instead, you need to learn the correct motions at a slow tempo and then gradually build up speed, allowing your body to be more comfortable with the tempo.

However, I think that two caveats need to be added to slow practice. One is to ensure that you practice the correct motions at the slow tempo. Sometimes, people practice motions at slow tempi that have nothing to do with what will have to be done at the fast tempo. They might not even realize that, as when playing very slowly, you often can hit all of the notes even when your physical motions are totally wrong. Of course, everything falls apart when you try to increase the tempo. For example, when practicing octaves, it is important that the wrist bounce that allows for a drop and a rebound is present even during slow practice. You may have to minimize the wrist bounce at a fast tempo, but that motion should be practiced even when playing slowly.

The other caveat is to maintain a sense of motion and musical direction, no matter how slowly you are playing. Sometimes, people play in a heavy and labored fashion when play slowly. That should be avoided, as it only causes tensions and makes it that much harder to increase the tempo. Instead, passagework should be practiced with a sense of forward motion, even during slow practice.

The other caveat is to maintain a sense of motion and musical direction, no matter how slowly you are playing. Sometimes, people play in a heavy and labored fashion when play slowly. That should be avoided, as it only causes tensions and makes it that much harder to increase the tempo. Instead, passagework should be practiced with a sense of forward motion, even during slow practice.

The other caveat is to maintain a sense of motion and musical direction, no matter how slowly you are playing. Sometimes, people play in a heavy and labored fashion when play slowly. That should be avoided, as it only causes tensions and makes it that much harder to increase the tempo. Instead, passagework should be practiced with a sense of forward motion, even during slow practice.

Most definitely! Slow practice must be making MUSIC slowly.

Agreed...My teacher sometimes has me play slowly but also has me count subdivisions of the beat. So the rhythmic accuracy is maintained, as opposed to playing a note and taking a long semi-random time to play the next. Slow but musical.

Many people, especially those who have never tried to learn something technically complex like a sport or playing an instrument to a high degree of skill, do not have good body awareness. Playing the piano requires us to isolate muscles and create very specific patterns of movement.The brain and the body operate at differing speeds--the brain processes thoughts much faster than the body can execute motion.Slow practice allows the body to experience--and learn--proper motion/form.It's frustrating, though, because the mind wants to go so much faster! I have no scientific proof of this, but the anecdotal proof is that I can memorize all the notes/dynamics etc. of a piece long before I can play them up to tempo!For me personally, slow practice is a must. Since I can't visually check my position on the keyboard, I have to teach myself exactly what it feels like to play passages correctly--the faster the passage, or the more leaps and other keyboard movements involved, the more this is true.I am better (i.e., more accurate) playing slower-tempo things, but, as a lover of Prokofiev, Bach, and many others, I have a huge list of faster pieces I want to play.The biggest challenge is having the patience and perseverance to do the kind of practice that works--and keep doing it--until you achieve the results you want.

Just as you sometimes need to spend money in order to earn money, you often need to practice slowly in order to learn how to play rapidly.

IMO this is an invalid analogy.

Why do you think so? In both cases, you initially do the opposite of what you intend the final outcome to be. In the first instance, you lose money (i.e. spend money) as part of a strategy to eventually gain money. In the second instance, you play slowly as part of a learning process that will eventually result in your being able to play rapidly. Just as people studying business sometimes have difficulty grasping the concept that you must sometimes spend money in order to increase profits, music students sometimes don't comprehend that slow practice can be conducive to fast playing.

3. repeat steps 1 and 2 for a few more days or weeks depending on difficulty of piece

4. speed up the music learned and stored from from attentive, accurate, slow practice to indicated tempo.

walah!

Personally, getting stressed from practicing and making mistakes usually means I'm trying to practice too fast. Very counter-intuitive as we all strive for that virtuosic tempo right off the bat. We hear it in our heads from listening to recordings etc, but our body does not react to it. The bridge between the music and the mechanical movement is linked and solidified quicker and more efficiently through slow practice. Getting enough quality sleep is also important.

By slow, clear and attentive practicing, our brain makes concise connections between motor, visual and auditory synapses that gets embedded as memory after daily practice and the REM sleep.

The amount of time required to learn a piece to tempo will slowly diminish as one's experience and expertise of the instrument grows, but there's really no getting around slow practicing because of the reinforcing that takes place as the brain makes connections and forms memories.

Polishing a Chopin Etude at the moment. Prof says to have it polished and memorized by next Tuesday. I thought I had it memorized today but realized I'm just sloppily blurring through some sections at tempo by ghosting notes because I'm "unsure" of what the exact passage is. Being able to play through a polished piece at half tempo and no mistakes is the best insurance for me that I have each note memorized, that is, after I can get through the piece at tempo with at least 90% accuracy. The final stages requires myself to return to a slow pace and then sleep on it and it really takes a lot of effort to slow myself down, especially when I "think" i can play a piece with 100% accuracy at full tempo but in reality, I cannot. I think the the real discipline in piano practice is knowing when to slow down again and willingly do so, which is what the OP has made note of.

pianoloverus
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Registered: 05/29/01
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Originally Posted By: LaReginadellaNotte

Originally Posted By: pianoloverus

Originally Posted By: LaReginadellaNotte

Just as you sometimes need to spend money in order to earn money, you often need to practice slowly in order to learn how to play rapidly.

IMO this is an invalid analogy.

Why do you think so? In both cases, you initially do the opposite of what you intend the final outcome to be. In the first instance, you lose money (i.e. spend money) as part of a strategy to eventually gain money. In the second instance, you play slowly as part of a learning process that will eventually result in your being able to play rapidly. Just as people studying business sometimes have difficulty grasping the concept that you must sometimes spend money in order to increase profits, music students sometimes don't comprehend that slow practice can be conducive to fast playing.